How Design Makes the World

by Scott Berkun

This means we can’t really say that something is well designed unless we identify what it’s going to be used for.

It assumes goodness and badness are defined by the thing, rather than by what the thing is used for.

What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for?

And if you can’t solve one real problem for one real person, it’s a good indicator that you probably can’t solve a problem for millions of people, either. And, of course, if the goal is to solve a problem for millions of people, you’ll need to study far more than just one person’s needs.

Our two important questions—what are you improving, and who for—are easy to ask.

Perhaps the most dangerous kind of design theater goes on in the designer’s own mind.

It seems counterintuitive to design for irrationality, but people are rarely as rational as we presume. “Often the psychology... is more important than the statistics of the wait itself,” said MIT operations researcher Richard Larson,³ one of the world’s top experts on the psychology of waiting.

Consumer culture makes it easy to believe that the ideal life is a series of intense but shallow pleasures, rather than a balance with deeper ones.

People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.⁸

Victor Papanek once wrote, “There are professions more harmful than... design, but only a few... by creating whole species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air... designers have become a dangerous breed.”¹⁴

Through these policies, poor and black neighborhoods were denied loans, as well as the right to move to neighborhoods where loans would be made available. Most Americans assume the free market decides the fate of neighborhoods, and is why some struggle and others thrive, but that’s often not true. Rey Ramsey, former chair of Habitat for Humanity, explains that despite the history, “people are lulled to sleep thinking that certain things happened by default, rather than by design.”⁸

Designers aren’t the only professionals to work in loops.

Real design means working with real constraints, however challenging they are. Good designers don’t fear constraints. They want to solve real problems, not fantasy ones.

Wise organizations realize committees are just one tool among many for decision-making. Having an empowered, specialized team to lead design decisions is a common solution.

To make anything good, whether it’s a book or a smart watch, I have to know that most people who will use it won’t be exactly like me. And while the consequences of making bad assumptions in a book are one thing, for someone designing a sidewalk, a software product or a law, the impact on people can be devastating.

Race and gender are just two, but there are many ways people are different from each other that designers must consider: 10 percent of humans are left handed, 13 percent are color blind, 61 percent wear glasses (4 percent have serious visual impairment), and 15 percent have a physical disability.⁹ And there are plenty more. Without considering other experiences, designers are guaranteed to exclude people.

One trap we face is that we like what’s familiar. We tend to spend time with people who remind us of those we already know. We socialize online, at school and at work mostly with people like us, and we come home to people like us, too.

Many organizations refer to “culture fit” and how, when hiring, it’s important that candidates fit into the existing environment. There’s danger here. It’s one thing if culture fit means a desire to do good work, or having useful skills, but it’s too easy to confuse someone who is different with someone who won’t fit in. Many differences are simply things you are not familiar with yet, but would appreciate if you gave them a chance. Every great thing in your life was once something new and unfamiliar, too.

Some designers resist data. They like the romance of creativity as an instinctive process. People lost in this fantasy believe that data works against creativity, but that’s more drive-by design. If they were making art, instincts alone would be fine. But for a smart watch to be successful, or a bathroom to be equitable, thoughtful use of data has to be part of the process.

The trap is that good design requires skepticism, too. Specifically, the willingness to put ego aside, and explore how easy it would be for your creation to frustrate people or serve unsavory masters.

Design is never neutral,⁴ or beneficial to everyone, certainly not in the way their makers presume their works will be.

Tradeoffs are central to understanding design. It’s inevitable in any pursuit that some goals you want to achieve are in tension with others. You might start a project desiring high quality and low cost, but eventually you’ll have to decide to choose one over the other (for example, your neural-Matrix interface may turn out to require a unique, expensive part). At the beginning of projects, when both optimism and ignorance are in abundance, it’s easy not to notice tradeoffs that will need to be made. Sometimes you can find an elegant solution that dances its way around them, but often the best design comes from clarity about the compromises you will make if you have to.

To measure design quality requires more than just looking: you have to use the thing for its purpose. We try on clothes and we test-drive cars, but often we don’t get to try before we decide. Even a test-drive isn’t great: you only get to drive the car for a few miles around the dealership. You can’t try your daily commute, or packing for a family vacation, or taking your route from the market to your home.

Is the goal to make something that’s appealing before it’s purchased, or something that satisfies real needs?

Perhaps the most important tradeoffs and values are the ones that get lost in discussions about products. People who buy things are called consumers, which implies that their primary value is what they consume, rather than what they learn, what they hope for or what they wish to contribute to society.

Continuity: information that’s offered for one task is repeated, at timely intervals, until the task is completed or destination reached. Discoverability: the right information should be the easiest to notice at the right time, and different items should never compete for attention. Consistency: the same icons, colors and terms are always used. A “restaurant” should not become a “snack bar.” Terms, colors and other items should only need to be learned once. Clarity: the meaning of every message must be clear to as many people as possible, even if they speak a different language.

Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen had simple advice for avoiding these problems. “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in... a city plan.”⁶

We rarely think about it this way, but most of design is redesign: applying what we know now to design choices made before us.

The challenge we face is this: how far into the future are we designing for? Are we willing to think through design collisions? Unintended consequences? Can we balance our individual desires with contributing to society and the longevity of the human experiment on planet earth?

None of them can do it alone. Which means, even for the brightest designers we have, it will be their ability to lead, persuade and collaborate with those in power, and their fellow citizens, that will guide to us making a better world.